Lisa Rosenberg's talk looks at questions in areas such as systems, creative pathways, symbolic language, and social discourse. She reads selections from her recent title, A Different Physics, and offer reflections on gifts and pitfalls of working in fields often perceived as disparate or divided. Lisa is in conversation with Roger Blandford of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at this Art Meets Science event.
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space my father brought home the blue
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jacketed government-issued views of the surface of the Moon parsed printed and
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bearing the cross hairs of our optics on modeled fields where illusion made
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bubbles of craters as we watched my small body tracking toward a moon cycle
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still years away toward wings I would seek to merit and a paper to confirm my
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degree in postulating the deep workings of a universe but not the world who
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sings to us first before the logic of reason before speech equations forged in
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the engines of memory hot interiors of moments that melt thought to muscle and
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words to thought good afternoon and
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welcome to our art meets science at SLAC lecture at different physics the poetics
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of discovery the art meets science lecture series investigates the
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intersections between these creative approaches to exploring the world around
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us I'm Angela Anderson from the slack Office of Communications and I thank you
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all for coming this afternoon and I welcome you to stay for the reception following the talk it'll take place in
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the lobby just outside the auditorium doors you just heard from poet Lisa Rosenberg who will share more of her
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fascinating poems in just a moment here to introduce her is Roger Blandford
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professor of physics and particle physics and former director of the Kavli Institute for particle astrophysics and
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cosmology whose home is right here in this building Roger and his group study
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some of the most extreme events in the universe such as black hole neutron stars and white dwarfs I'm sure
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we'll learn more about the poetry of science as he engages our poet speaker
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today in conversation following her presentation please welcome Roger Blandford through poetry essays in
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conversation Lisa Rosenberg works from shared territory in science and art she holds
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degrees in both physics and creative writing and was a wallace stegner fellow
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in poetry here at Stanford prior to the Fellowship she worked as a research
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engineer in space craft hardware and flew as a private pilot she later
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founded the marketing consulting practice and recently served as the second poet laureate of San Mateo County
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her debut poetry collection a different physics was awarded the red mountain
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poetry prize released last year Lisa's
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poems explore natural and cultural landscapes the art of making and the
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drive to question inherited models she's creating a series of Poli disciplinary
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essays and engagements bringing pools of poetry and science to the ocean discourse on our modes of inquiry and
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enterprise she looks forward to continuing this work in the newly
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awarded Geraci residency for scientists and artists in 2020 the Rosenberg
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[Applause] Thank You Roger for volunteering or
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agreeing to be drafted into conversation with me today thank all of you for being
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here and my thanks also to this very gifted team of people here at SLAC who put
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together these events I'd also like to acknowledge the great generosity of
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thought of those who created conceived of and created this lecture series of
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art meets science and knowing that this space has probably witnessed many more
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lectures than poetry readings I am going to talk for just a bit give a reading
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and then Roger and I will we'll be in conversation to explore more of the
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questions that the poems and the talk bring up and then welcome questions from
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all of you so art meets science and they
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do meet in many ways and in more ways than intersections and the notions of
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complementarity can reveal I found that if we look through a lens of commonality
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and from that shared territory that is really where some of the very powerful
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tools and insights can come from we know
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from you know current conversations ongoing investigations that poetry and
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physics specifically art and science more broadly are these exquisite ways of
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describing and gaining understanding about this nonlinear universe a very
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cyclical world and they offer the opportunity to be in something other
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than our ingrained ways of thinking and working so the more we can use those
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invitations to to think differently than we normally think whether it's outside of our
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discipline or outside of our habits the more we do have access to the processes
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that put us in discovery mode a poem a
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piece of scientific work these are processes of exploration that allow us
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to be in synthesis which is one word for insight to come to discoveries or
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epiphany and we can think of it Tiffany as we could discontinuous insight you
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know that kind of huge leap where we don't see the small logical steps or
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ways of coming to those things that really are emergent properties of
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complex dynamic systems and in that sense I I do consider the act of poetic
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composition and also with reading and experiencing a poem to be exploratory spaces poetry is problem-solving on
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multiple levels with many interdependencies and we're usually
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talking about emergent effects as opposed to discrete characteristics so
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in the spirit of that I chose the the poem space to open with we're going to
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go back in time just for a moment to you
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know from that was an animation of a model of dark matter that was on the screen there these are very old
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photographs I collected this collage from hard copies at home from these old
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JPL notebooks that my father had we used to have the outdated versions lying
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around the house to peruse wonder over or scribble on whatever the case may be
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so many of you probably have had that experience of you know it's a bubble no
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it's a crater and then being able to make it go back and forth which was great fun but
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mostly I shared this piece because in part it's a very condensed biography it
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answers questions that you could not answer in a single paragraph or more but
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more importantly because this really was a case where I had to remain or put
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myself in a mode of exploration and not go where I was trying to drive it so I
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had a very tightly held agenda of what I wanted this poem to do I wanted it to be
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so it biographical and I wanted it to arrive at some great kind of cosmological insight or confluence of
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the artistic in the scientific and I had to let that go
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it was um it went through many many versions over years finally ended up in
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the format it has when I decided to open with the line about my father bringing these these photographs of these books
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home and the Wonder and to follow that wonder and instead of ending up at a
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great cosmological insight I ended up at something very very specific about my humaneness that I would not have found
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otherwise so I I would like to talk a little bit about the process of
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exploration and discovery and then read some poems that aren't necessarily about
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science per se and I use the word about very reluctantly whenever I discuss
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poetry but poems that illustrate different ways that that process of
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exploration might happen on different sets of constraints and I have to say I
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love being here and talking that way because it needs to be an engineering
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world kind of my everyday speak loaded with too many acronyms and then the
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acronyms fall away and then we we use say the language of the literary world or the linguistics side of things and so
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we'll bring back in just a few words like constraints so what is our work our
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work whether we are building a poem making a
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poem or hunting for a quasar we have an initial point we have a point we end up
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at and we have a process in the middle so um you go back to dark matter in a
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bit in a very simple sense we I mean invite us to really open up our language
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because our language and our thinking are very much coupled and the more we can create a larger frame for our
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terminology the more open we can be about it so if we call this a place where we embark calling X sub zero and
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where we arrive X sub N and it's not
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infinite but it's definitely iterative and this is you know what is this this
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is the process we can call exploration
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these points have very you know a variety of names in the art world we
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might call it you know an aesthetic impulse a personal a personal area of
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interest that we want to explore or that we want to we want to share with the
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world on the scientific or technical side it might be a contractual demand
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might be it might be a piece of some
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bigger project some scope of that at the
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base of both of those we hope is curiosity over here what do we want to
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arrive at you know when these could all come under the term agenda but is it a
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deliverable
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results Solutions the word that is
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thankfully I think got out of use in poetry I think Robert Frost had a wonderful way
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of saying it when he said a momentary stay again confusion some kind of
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understanding sometimes expression
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although that's not the primary role in poetry so some kind of understanding so
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we have these the impetus we have these kind of goals or objectives that we're
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driving toward no part of this it's without bias you know we hope to arrive
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at a discovery with the more loosely we can hold these desired outcomes the more
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we can head off that premature narrowing of our paths of inquiry that's that's
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really kind of the soapbox message but that brings up a lot of questions most
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of which start with how so how do we come become aware of our biases how do
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we set out when we don't know exactly where we're going or what we're looking
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for how do we proceed when we're being told what to find what to look for I
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think that's even harder and then how do we get unstuck when we do get stuck so
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this is really you know poetry has become poetry and language have become
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my lab of preference at this point I think because all my personal
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sensibilities just go toward patterns in sound and language and wordplay
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and all of that it's not to say that you know obviously there are many kinds of
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labs and I love being here in a lab talking about this web of language
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poetry is a lab in part because of the kinds of problem-solving that it has
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that it offers like physics it requires us to move fluidly between the micro the
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macro and the meta we can do that before
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we have the skills in higher math or after we've lost them those go away
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faster than muscle tone so how do we you
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know how to answer these house I think that you know what really can keep us
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honest in our process and by honest I mean not going to where we so badly want
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it to go the answer there really is craft you know process again to quote
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Robert Frost not that he's the only person who who's ever spoken with insight on poetry but his essay the
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figure of poem makes really talks about the process of discovery and you know he
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says no chairs and the writer no chairs and the reader no surprise for the
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writer no surprise for the reader and that you need to proceed line by line with the rules of language in order to
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discover what comes next not to just know where you want the piece to go and drive it there through
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your lovely devices that you spend years honing so he tells us the why because
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yeah we want to we want to have this element of surprise we want these every
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line you arrive at to be in the words of another teacher both inevitable and
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surprising you know that beautiful blend of fit so
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that's you know the why it doesn't tell us a lot about the how and I think that
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if if that becomes the next area of focus that's where we we will build out
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what you could think of as a meta toolset or the the common tool set from
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dual focus and Dual Immersion I do think
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that that whole aspect of you know what if insight what is discovery what are
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the things we what are the names we have for it that we're not even aware of you
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know today given the kinds of crises and challenges we're facing my default is
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usually to to become aware of it start naming it try to name it you know naming
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is both an act of observation and an act of synthesis we're both differentiating
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we're parsing we're really breaking things down and we are bringing things together so if you start to work on
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articulation you definitely find out where you have gaps it's a way of
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getting in stuck it's like going back to first principles so definitions new
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definitions functional definitions within the area that you're working in
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building taxonomy so that you can see things like apps and abundances and
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linkages whether existing or potential that's where I think that poetry really
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does offer us this fab fascinating a really demanding lab because we don't
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have those built in structures like equations or units to point out glaring
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inconsistencies that we might not be aware of you really have to hone your skills of
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taxonomy in poetry we can't rely on balancing equation or dimensional
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analysis or just keeping things consistent with variables so you you hone those
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taxonomical principles I am sure that
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there are many wonderful gems I am missing here but I want to have time for
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some poems given that we we did start a little late to allow for the parking so
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I'm going to share a few poems that are clips from my kind of journey as a maker
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and being in the process of discovery one of those one of those processes is
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staying in wonder and following that wonder and I'm often really compelled by
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things by objects whether they are inanimate objects or living creatures or
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once living creatures or ideas and following you know just going into that
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trying to either describe it or animate it give it a voice is one way when we
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follow what compels us in curiosity and
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to learn about why we are compelled can reveal a lot not only about what we're
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studying but about ourselves our preferences our biases our strengths and so forth this first piece is called
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Archaeopteryx perfect as nike head bent
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feathers arrested the imprint of upturned wings a likeness to wonder at
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your last flight dear prototype and the
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word prototype there I meant I think as much in a sense of Aeronautics as
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evolution it was an emotion given that our lives are very very far apart in
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time moon jellies and this is the first of probably several poems with the moon
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more poems with the moon this is a piece where I really did get stuck and I think
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I I was stuck for about two years in the middle of it and I I wanted I'm hoping
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most of you have seen the moon jelly exhibits at the Monterey aquarium I wanted to use the metaphor of those
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bright those bright arcs in the middle I wanted those to be a filament like an
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incandescent bulb I was shocked when I
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learned what they actually were and when I came back to that shock that was my
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entry point back into the poem and letting it go and finding out what
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metaphor it would then find moon jellies animate in the back lit black tank you
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fly lace edged ghost bells propelled by
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such grace as I cannot match with my clumsy spine my opacity the aging truths
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inside me unseen and unborn stung by the
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fact of your eggs in arced Rose hot
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flower in a clear spell one more moon
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poem and this again followed an object of wonder for me my father slide well
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which my mom found and this is a piece
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where I actually had no idea where it would go I just knew that this was an
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object of memorabilia for me certainly
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because it was found long after my father passed away and fascination at
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that whole era slide rule to love
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elegance of speed against a different meter of a different day
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day you walked out to suburbs and cars and the faithful hold of motor oil on
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hot asphalt and orange blossoms a sky
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ripe for the faint drone of airplanes their hulls designed with aligned
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precision and the fortitude of hand calculations of penciled graphs
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blueprints and circle templates on an angled drafting board mechanical tools
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where mechanical telephone bells call through the plumes above crowded
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ashtrays and coffee rings on flecked Formica the desks in rows the men in
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ties and shirts leaves I am almost there in my pixie cut and
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white shoes on family day a gape at the dark control room unaware of the beauty
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of logarithms the fluid promises of computing that this laminate rule will
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soon outlast its hayday a burnished leather case and all of us there is war
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on the news we are scaling the moon and everyone I love is living or yet to be
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born
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I'm in airplane mode in more ways than
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one but if you wear the mic you have to be an airplane mode or you lose your your sense of balance or something we
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are running a little tight on time so I'm gonna read three really short poems
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from my my time in like really in the engineering trenches and then a closing
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piece and then Roger and I will we'll go to the living and have a conversation so again I
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objects wanting to animate objects I found that that was one way that I could meet things that were daunting
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threatening things I had fear or or conflict around and but also to find
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beauty to find beauty in odd ways and odd things and places and admittedly a
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lot of this is pre digital paper era polygraph
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what are they sampling these slender and ten I who's clubbed tips startle and
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drift over paper tape which truths do they taste
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how many evade the thin dark stop they
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weep cleanroom I know you have more than
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one here on site do not shed your DNA
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here restrain your hair let no
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exhalation fog or mist the air this jumpsuit these tissue booths will rein
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you in as no other fashion can well the bouffant cap and blue or white is the
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great equalizer making grannies of all as we tend the sensitive but tensile
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strong that by dust specks come undone
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many of these poems I found that that come from that environment in that part of my life and I like would give them a
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voice but there was always some snark in that voice and I just learned to enjoy that
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this one is well although this this piece definitely had had more compassion
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and curiosity and maybe sadness in it zero defects is a motto from
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started in aerospace migrated into other industries and thus I walked in my first
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day of work and there it was on a doormat it kind of brought out a lot of my rebellious thinking especially being
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fresh out of college zero defects I want
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a new notion of perfection one to live with in my defect full humaneness bone
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cache chatter and thought rest let me
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admit the whole within the scrap and learn to find scrappiness on a par with
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the truth as truth moves to plural as we
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fail and flourish beyond the slashed zero so give me great pleasure as a poet
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to slant rhyme plural and zero but that really was a piece whereas I got stuck I
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had to go back to my my tool which is really working by sound and especially
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bowel sounds I never would have found thought breast if I hadn't gone back to humaneness
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and that allowed me to proceed because I had gotten very stuck up to then so I
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will close with one fairly short poem so that we have enough time for discussion
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conversation and questions I'm leaving out the landscape poems there are I do
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write about landscapes and other things besides kind of worlds of engineering
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and physics and this piece in particular really goes back to poets physicists
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engineers machinists I grew up with a
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shop it's called to the makers maker is the ancient Greek word for the modern
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greek word for poet and a poem is a making and I wrote it because I had the
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experience after reading a poem by Ted Kooser former u.s. laureate of as Emily
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Dickinson says those at the top of my head were taken off and I think that was 19th century speak for having your mind blown really so I
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read this poem of kusers and I had that I have chills just describing it and I thought wow I want to tell him I want
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him to know I still need to do that he is he areas in the Midwest and how often
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do we have that experience and we can't tell this the maker of that piece of art
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or piece of equipment great invention
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because they're long dead or somehow remote from us so this poem started out
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of that desire to tell them to the makers I want to tell them all of them
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the living and the dead not about gratitude I want them to know
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to tell them that it happens years or ages after their labors
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it happens with their work in my hand on a bowed page at or near the end of a
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phrase a fissure opens onto the deep lake of their making its slate skin and
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forested rim tools strewn on the silty bottom wavering shapes soft with life
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along grooves and shanks through this water through murk and Sun shaft and
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clear shoals the pressure building or falling off they'd ov and rose time and
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again hauling gleaning and leaving the
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lake to make a portal from words so with
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that I invite Roger up to join me in
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conversation
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my water yeah well thank you very much
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Lisa thank you for sharing your opponents with us and I would say reading them and also discussing them in
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a very engaging way I think you describe this as our living room so we'll have a
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very informal conversation yeah looking
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for the model things that actually there was a little bit about your biography
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which came first you think in your life the physics and the engineering or the
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verse or did they sort of grow together with you well I noticed you phrase that very carefully because when we met prior
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to this event and I said oh I often get the question of why did you switch and I
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say well I didn't switch I think in terms of you know initial exposure I had
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I was fortunate to grow up with people working very earnestly in arts and in
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sciences but I didn't necessarily have those labels on them so with a father
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who was an engineer and a builder there was always this you know well we're
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gonna do these things that I only later found out were math that most say 1st or 2nd graders don't get to do and then
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having painters and musicians on the other side of the family I think though if I put all of it into
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one big category it was design and so
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whether I was drafting and I thought I invented drafting whether I was drafting
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and designing a building or a piece of clothing it all felt like the same to me
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but in terms of you know explicit immersion it was probably the writing
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because you're given opportunities to do that sooner in school you know like in
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elementary school and it was in high school though that I really started to focus more in poetry
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but at the same time I was determined to become an astronaut and so I was
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studying physics at the same time I didn't I didn't separate them more until
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I decided I needed periods of dedicated study in one or the other
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your father was clearly a large influence upon you and it's pretty an engineer at amount of numbers but was he
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also a man of letters was he some who care deeply about language was even a poet he was not a poet he wrote very
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well and he communicated well and I think that goes back to just those tools
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of thought that will come out wherever and that of course was an era where you
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didn't study say stem to the exclusion of the humanities just as you know you
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came out of that same kind of background and I'm he always impressed upon me writing down and getting your thinking
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clearer whether you're working on an essay or solving a calculus problem you have to write it down and and see you're
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thinking he was definitely a practical genius I think in minute he usually
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figured out the simplest least fancy way to do something amazing and may or may
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not have been credited for it you know but really the gift was that I grew up in a house where I had this model all
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the time of this absolute love of making things of making mistakes of pursuing
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those of knowing it's not going to be ideal and tinkering which is another map
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to discovery just to to tinker and always building and making things whether they were models or or full-size
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full-size they were playing at one point and your mother you mentioned the other side of your family you said my mother's
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side were musicians and tailors seamstresses painters there was music in
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my father's side as well my mother had that amazing capacity to know how to support whichever way interests were
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going and I remain very grateful for that and she still is extremely
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Porter than that but she definitely my grand my maternal grandmother was a painter and designer and her husband a
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pianist I could surrounded by by art
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especially my grandmother's yes yeah we turned to the craft of poetry and
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obviously it's there's no simple answer to these questions but if if you're
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trying deciding you want to write a poem does it sort of grow from the inside out
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or do you have what people often accuse scientists of having quite incorrectly a
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great master planner they go to them fill in the pieces along the way yes
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both so you know we can have a very
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strong desire to write a particular piece whether or not that meets some kind of lyric impulse we we don't know
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but for me poems really I can hold these
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things that I know I want to write about what typically happens is I will hear
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something Musa here's the musical language or I will see something and a
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phrase arises I haven't haven't gotten to that point of development personal
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development where I had this nice space between experience and putting it into
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language so I will come up with a phrase and if it intrigues me if it's rhythmic
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and musical I will follow it and I do work by ear very much like writing a song and I need to hear what comes next
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if I don't it'll sit there but I will
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often build it out and I'll use the tools of craft whether it's choosing a
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metrical structure choosing a complete existing structure like a sonnet or
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blank versts I enjoy playing first free verse as well in free first it's not so
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free because you have to make every decision so sometimes I will look for a
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model if I'm really stuck and I know I want to write about something I will take a
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model and just work through it because that will force me at least to find out things I didn't know and then I can take
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that like those are like studies and and hopefully move into actually creating
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this piece in some ways it's like growing it crystal yeah you know one
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follows the reductionist zeal of a particle physicist the poem becomes a series letters and spaces of punctuation
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have we back off from that a little bit to the atoms of the business which might be the words you sort of alluded to this
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and the answer has to be both I know but a word has the sound right you say the
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music there and so on but it also has to make connections illusions metaphor however you want to put it to it to
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other ideas or things that you may be sharing with the reader how do you
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balance those two when you're looking you're stuck in you the word and you know there's a word that ought to fit there right so there's there's a duality
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in physics yes and it was duality and writing so part of it is trusting that
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those connections you're making in the sound patterns there is a there's some
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knowledge in those connections I mean we and this is you know this is a field
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they say in psychology and neuroscience that we do have some very visceral and emotive connotations with sound patterns
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and and the muscular structures that go with them and we inherently know we can hear you know a very very tiny clip of a
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piece of music and know if it's a sad and melancholy piece or you know there are rhythms that go with dirges and
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rhythms that go with celebration and so for me I tend to be very sensitive to
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the sound patterns and I trust that there is some kind of meaningful
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connection or I will look for the meaningful connection or I'll take it as
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a challenge you know like if someone in an improvisation gives you two things and says
41:36
the connection sometimes they really do I think we are predisposed to find
41:42
things that fall within the scope of our Curia so that is where I think those
41:48
those come together and it's this big thrill when you know hey this is going
41:54
to get me - yeah this idea I'm hoping to to build and learn more about going the
42:01
other way and we look at the large-scale structure on the screen and so we look
42:06
at look at your book you had essentially three themes here you split the phones
42:13
into three themes was that a conscious thing or something or an organization I should say what they are asked I retold
42:20
kingdom of secrets of markets those are the three themes they're good descriptive words but was that a
42:26
conscious thought started just a way of organizing them at the end that is something that's like this process once
42:33
you start to see work come together it's very much like listening to your data and you look for trends and you look for
42:41
themes to emerge and start to look at the wave that sub groups seem to
42:47
organize and the Kingdom of Secrets was definitely this coherent group of poems
42:53
about working in the military-industrial complex especially place where words actual words are very tightly controlled
43:01
and that was also like you know the the Draenei through through the underworld
43:06
and out ask I retold really kind of captured those landscape pieces and
43:14
exploring places that I've lived in their influence on me and then models
43:21
was the hardest one to figure out it's not like you just put all this all these
43:26
poems that don't fit in one into another and you do find when you're putting together a manuscript and I know several
43:32
of these faces that I recognize here from my poetry family and people know what this is like you know you you try
43:40
to find how the work comes together there are people who have projects that go the other way they're going to build
43:45
into a theme and sometimes it's kind of a midpoint between those
43:51
but the models I suddenly realized we're both literal and figurative because I
43:56
grew up with a model builder in physics we use models and we make models and
44:04
then as growing up in especially in the 70s as a girl you know we're exposed to
44:12
these models of what is feminine what is sexy what what are you supposed to be what are you not supposed to be and so
44:19
all of those really came into models and then there's this fascination with things and poems about things which are
44:25
usually I'll discover some kind of model in there and then the closing piece
44:30
really is that Vitruvian model yes and growing up with that it's kind of the ideal of Western rational scientific
44:38
thought that leads to everything wonderful and wanting to free that from gender especially yes yeah I could get
44:49
no better person to make this contrast between the tinkering the modeling the
44:57
creative process in the one hand and engineering and science and then the other hand in in writing and in
45:05
particular in poetry how how do you there's obvious differences and there
45:12
are not many poems written by 20 authors for example and can you can you imagine
45:18
that from yet you know so I'm most scientific papers are those collaborative processes and squeeze out
45:24
any poetry I hadn't been but but can you see any other similarities and
45:31
differences between those two well you know there are people who will now
45:36
crowdsource a poem or work collaboratively but we do we collaborate
45:42
with the past certainly yes you know we are taking every time you act you're
45:48
right it's an act of criticism and you are taking the work that came before you and either you're in conflict with it
45:57
you're in concert with it some combination of those and we do solicit
46:02
the the feed the comments the the deconstruction and
46:07
help support and reconstruction from our peers so many writers do work with other
46:14
writers to critique each other's work and help help you know not only to to
46:20
improve a piece refine it but to support us in that process so there is a lot of
46:27
collaboration I think it's just not always simultaneous you miss develop a list of all themselves and right exactly
46:34
you you won't find it all yes it's not necessarily simultaneous and it also doesn't happen within the same body of
46:40
work yes yes I think that might be actually quite a good time to ask the
46:45
audience for questions so or comments or even a poem maybe so there are over do
46:51
cover roaming mic or if you're in the middle or is what yes you can share maybe yes hi thank you for sharing your
46:58
poetry that was lovely my son is also an engineer and a poet and he strongly
47:05
prefers in his poetry to work in formal structures so a sonnet or a particular
47:12
rhyme scheme or a particular meter
47:17
because he feels like it imposes discipline and the chat and makes it a
47:24
bigger challenge and he's sort of scornful of the freeform poetry that doesn't have to conform to a particular
47:31
structure I'm wondering about your thoughts on on meter versus nine well
47:36
you would have you would have meter in whether you're in an open forum or a fixed form but we are free to create
47:44
successful or unsuccessful poems in either mode and it's really a trade-off
47:52
because you have you have a set of freedoms and a set of requirements in
47:58
each and they're different so we might find ourselves constantly migrating to
48:03
one or the other the open forum or the fixed form without an awareness of why
48:10
we we're more comfortable in one or the other and it's a huge leap as an
48:16
investigator or may when you come into that mode of conscious compositional choices whether
48:24
you're composing an experiment or a piece of art so when you start to become aware of why you're making those choices
48:31
and all of you suddenly have a lot more tools to make the choices when you
48:37
become aware of the need to make them each time so in a fixed form some of those choices are already off the table
48:43
so it frees you up to do more I mean you have more attentive energy available to
48:49
to work because you're not deciding on the line length or the number of lines or the rhyme scheme in free-verse you
48:56
have to make all of those decisions and hope they're all really fitting to what you want to do the other though the
49:03
other kind of gift of working in a an existing form is that it forces you to
49:09
find connections that you might not find otherwise because you have to you have to build that line out to a certain
49:16
length or you have to meet a rhyme scheme and not have it sound hokey you
49:23
want a lovely rhyme which doesn't mean it has to be hidden but but that word still needs to work the phrase that
49:28
still need to work so gifts on both sides and I think the more aware we are
49:33
of why we make those choices and what options we have the better we you know our makings will be ever you do it's ha
49:44
you know sometimes sometimes it's harder than others you know really some pieces arrive quickly as gifts and others can
49:52
take days weeks months years and decades
50:25
yes I mean I have some work that that's in progress now and some of it when I say
50:31
in progress sometimes it has to wait because you're just too busy and yes you
50:37
kind of you can go anywhere in terms of distance and time in a poem it's not to
50:44
say you have no constraints because you do have constraints but you're you're free to explore and to build out a lyric
50:50
a narrative a lyric narrative in that way and I it's just like science fiction
50:57
novels you you create this space for both yourself and the reader or listener
51:04
to experience that so for me I don't
51:09
consciously say this is called science fiction but I might be yeah or going
51:16
into a world you know especially there's some planetary bodies that I really am intrigued by right now and so exploring
51:24
them and how to describe them and you know where can we put ourselves or or or RV ourselves as viewers or or people
51:32
experiencing it you know you can be right there on the surface if you like
51:37
look forward to that thank you
51:52
[Laughter] well the kind of tongue-in-cheek answer
52:00
is when you sit with them for such a long time or when you are busy as
52:05
someone else's employee doing something else and you know you have to carry them
52:10
in your head and you can only work on what you're able to memorize and you're building them that way then they're there and I have a very oral memory for
52:20
and visual both but so for a long time I had memorized the del squared operator
52:27
in spherical polar coordinates I could recite the entire thing well it had a it
52:34
was because of the rhythm you know it was one over R squared partial partial R as if that's all I remember at this
52:40
point but it's like those you know songs that you can't get out of your head you
52:47
know it's not that they all stick but when I built by ear there you know and
52:53
and I had teachers who made us recite from memory because that's how we would we would learn what is memorable so part
53:01
of its personal the way I work and and some of it's a gift and I do find though
53:07
that if I haven't read a piece in a long time then if I'm reading in front of a large group I can go into that mode you
53:14
know that's the way to teach physics is verse oh yeah so my question was about
53:28
like sorry okay so I just want to say thank you for coming as a physicist and
53:35
as a poet I really appreciate like just being in this room and like being in community with other people who think interdisciplinary think in those ways
53:42
but um I know you already talked or touched upon like the military industrial complex and like gender
53:48
models and I'm I'm curious as to like your process in terms of where you
53:54
derive urgency in your writing and also in moving through interdisciplinary
53:59
worlds how you ground yourself while you're writing hmm grounding is one of those life
54:06
skills that just doesn't seem to go away you know I it's a little hard to get my
54:14
head around the question in terms of urgency it's kind of like conflict or
54:23
desires you know like oh I really want a life partner or oh I'm really
54:29
uncomfortable about whatever this is I knew the military industrial complex for
54:34
me was so rich and also so conflicted because I couldn't work in the ways
54:40
where I felt most valued and I was being like the eldest son you know going into
54:47
my fathers and grandfathers profession and they were hardly any women that you know when it was like in hidden figure
54:53
it was like three blocks to find a ladies room or but the urgency is
54:59
something that I have an intuitive sense about or you know the universe keeps
55:04
putting it in front of you coming up hoping that we'll meet with the lyric impulse is something that I
55:12
think practice can help with some people do you know right no matter what it
55:18
sounds like I would be very picky and I would want to like I know that sounds like a poem but it isn't some of these
55:25
pieces I just had to hold until I felt I had the permission to work on them so
55:32
some of that is self permission others is oh I've signed an agreement how do I
55:38
work around that poetry is though in all aspects of life an art of saying what
55:44
cannot be said and so even if you're prohibited from saying things and I have poems in an essay about that you can
55:51
still find ways to explore it and to to share it that exploration invite a
55:57
listener into it that's one other we can
56:02
also we can also talk in the reception as well so when we have one more question and then
56:16
I was interested that you used words to describe how you arrived at a conclusion
56:21
at the beginning you refer to bias and being told what to look for what the
56:28
result would be you may be aware that this is a common problem not so common
56:34
but an occasional problem in science where physicists latch on to certain
56:40
beliefs because of their beauty their symmetry things like symmetry principles
56:45
and conservation laws are cherished by physicists who sometimes extrapolate
56:51
them beyond the experimental proof there are some famous examples of that having
56:57
to do for example with the concept of conservation of parity the fact that we
57:02
have a right hand means that left hand and then reactions that are viewed in a
57:09
mirror should certainly be possible turns out it's not true and yet people
57:15
left leap to the conclusion that even though this was proven in certain cases
57:21
that it was a universal law which it was not leading to a revolution and
57:26
understanding of science back in the 1950s so I just wanted to point it out
57:33
that physicists are also subject to being led in wrong directions by being
57:41
enamored of certain well I had hoped to imply that I included all of that yeah and that's what I meant by how do we
57:48
stay honest you know what keeps us honest and becoming aware of the models
57:53
that are at play in our mind or the constructs you know such as parody or becoming aware of our habits of thought
58:00
and our habits of working you know and and when we need a question and how we
58:08
need to question so that's a matter of practice and a matter of building a
58:15
toolset really for asking those kinds of questions and remembering to put them in
58:21
you know to bring them into our process because especially when you have an outside directive on where you're
58:27
supposed to be looking or what type of thing you're supposed to be finding the pressures to go in that direction
58:33
are are intense and it's very easy to fall into these habitual you know
58:39
cognitive diagrams of where the knowledge falls are what phenomenon tends to be here in which which there
58:47
and how they how they are related those are all areas that are you know we have existing patterns that we want to put
58:54
the knowledge into that sounds like wise advice intense science and so science I
59:01
think we close up now I was gonna offer as a gift just a beloved poem that's
59:08
also from the sky as many of these pieces are upon by Hafiz
59:14
translated by Daniel lijinsky and it's a piece that I often return to especially
59:20
now for calm and for insight it's called this sky this sky where we live is no
59:31
place to lose your wings so fly fly fly
59:40
so thank you I think [Applause]
59:54
and thank you so much wonderful questions we could just go on but I hope you'll bring your questions
1:00:00
to the reception afterwards I want to thank Lisa and Roger my colleagues
1:00:07
Rachel Yael Linda chuckling for the photos and a special thanks to Lisa
1:00:13
Bonet our chief engineer here at slack who introduced us to Lisa so please join
1:00:19
us thank you [Applause]
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